Designing an effective and sustainable citizen science (CS) project requires consideration of a great number of factors. This makes the overall process unpredictable, even when a sound, user-centred design approach is followed by an experienced team of UX designers. Moreover, when such systems are deployed, the complexity of the resulting interactions challenges any attempt to generalisation from retrospective analysis. In this paper, we present a case study of the largest single platform of citizen driven data analysis projects to date, the Zooniverse. By eliciting, through structured reflection, experiences of core members of its design team, our grounded analysis yielded four sets of themes, focusing on Task Specificity, Community Development, Task Design and Public Relations and Engagement. For each, we propose a set of design claims (DCs), drawing comparisons to the literature on crowdsourcing and online communities to contextualise our findings.

Abstract

Designing an effective and sustainable citizen science (CS) project requires consideration of a great number of factors. This makes the overall process unpredictable, even when a sound, user-centred design approach is followed by an experienced team of UX designers. Moreover, when such systems are deployed, the complexity of the resulting interactions challenges any attempt to generalisation from retrospective analysis. In this paper, we present a case study of the largest single platform of citizen driven data analysis projects to date, the Zooniverse. By eliciting, through structured reflection, experiences of core members of its design team, our grounded analysis yielded four sets of themes, focusing on Task Specificity, Community Development, Task Design and Public Relations and Engagement. For each, we propose a set of design claims (DCs), drawing comparisons to the literature on crowdsourcing and online communities to contextualise our findings.